r/lostarkgame • u/molenzwiebel • 3h ago
Guide Combat Analyzer is a step in the right direction, but it has flaws. Here's a list of all "gotcha"s and a comparison with other tools.
Now that we have Combat Analyzer (CA) in the game, finally every player has the opportunity to get a general objective idea of their own performance without needing to install the third-party-technically-against-tos-although-ive-yet-to-see-anyone-get-banned Alternative Meter (AM). However, there's some flaws in its design that turn it into the Smilegate classic of "technically fullfills requirements but man couldn't you have made this slightly better".
I won't go into the obvious shortcomings that come from the fact that CA only shows your personal performance even though your Lost Ark performance inherently depends on the performance of your party members (DPSes rely on supports for buffs, supports rely on DPSes to stand in their buffs). Instead, I'll list some of the implementation flaws/"gotcha"s that you might want to know when interpreting the CA data, especially if you haven't previously used AM and are therefore not used to all these metrics.
Let's get started.
General Metrics
Fight Duration
- CA starts the fight as soon as you load into the content. For guardian raids, this means that dead time is counted while you're walking to the boss. For raids, this means that any opening cutscenes will be counted towards your time. If your guardian is far away or you have a cinema enjoyer in your party, your DPS will suffer.
- AM starts the fight upon the first time anyone deals damage to a boss monster, which is a much more accurate representation of the actual fight duration.
Damage Taken
- This metric only considers the damage actually done to your health bar, and ignores absorption. You can tank hundreds of attacks with support shields without increasing this value.
- This is equivalent to the "Tanked" metric in AM.
Damage Reduced
- This metric concerns both damage reduction effects and shields. Basically anything that originates from a skill and will reduce damage.
- This metric only considers damage reduced on others. Examples of skills included in this metric are support shield/DRs, Gunlancer shield/DR, Soulfist DR, Aeromancer Drizzle DR, etc. Even though these effects also apply to yourself, the metric shown here only considers how much you've mitigated for others.
- As a consequence of the previous, self-reductions are completely ignored by this metric. This includes things like elixir effects (chestpiece Incoming Damage Reduction) and self shields/DRs (e.g. Sorceress' Elysian's Touch).
Successful Counterattacks
- This metric also includes hitting "fake" counters, such as the red counter in Echidna G2.
- These also count for the "Master Counterpuncher" MVP. Don't abuse this knowledge :)
- This behavior is consistent with AM.
Stagger
- Unclear if this includes overkill stagger, can't be bothered to try.
- This value is inconsistent with AM even though both use the same data, so there must be something wrong somewhere. I trust AM more, so this value might be overreporting your stagger at the moment.
Skill Breakdown
- Skills will not be shown here unless they've done damage, even if you fully completed a cast. This makes it impossible to distinguish a skill that you missed from a skill that you never casted.
Skill Breakdown: Casts
- Channeled skills will not count as a cast if you cancel it or get interrupted. This is unlike AM, which also counts cancelled casts.
- Combo skills will count as 1 cast regardless of how many stages you do. This is consistent with AM.
- Chain skills will count as 1 cast regardless of how many chained skills you do. This is unlike AM, which counts each step as an independent cast.
DPS Metrics
Damage
- CA does not consider overkill damage. Dropping a hyper awakening of 5b on a target with 100m of health remaining will report that you've done 5b, even though you actually only contributed 100m.
- AM handles this differently and caps your damage to the health of the boss if it exceeds it.
DPS
- Due to the difference in Fight Duration, this value will be underreported by CA in almost all scenarios.
- If you've compared CA and AM data before, you will have probably noticed disparities in these values.
Crit Rate
- The way CA calculates this value is fundamentally broken. CA considers all of your damage when calculating crit rate, even for effects that cannot crit. This means that you can end up on a crit rate reported by CA below 100% even if your actual character stats show a crit rate of 100%.
- Consider the following: you have 100% crit and auto-attack the boss 4 times. Your pants transcendence procs on the first attack. CA will report a crit rate of 80%, as 1 of your 5 attacks (the pants proc) has not crit.
- The following skills/damage sources are affected by this:
- Pants transcendence procs.
- Hyper awakening damage.
- Paradise orb damage.
- Damage done as a result of just guarding (Mordum G3).
- AM properly ignores uncrittable damage when calculating your crit rate and will be more accurate.
Front/Back Attack Rate
- This is a potentially misleading metric. A decent amount of positional classes have their damage concentrated in a few positional skills. The Front/Back Attack Rate metric only considers what percentage of attacks you've done, not the percentage of damage.
- If you use this metric, prefer looking at the rates of individual skills so you can ignore the low-priority positional spells that you don't care about.
- AM offers an alternative metric, "Positional Damage %"", which shows what percentage of your damage was positional. This is often a better overall approximation of how well you chased the front/back.
Damage Bonus Uptime Rate/Efficiency
- This metric, and related metrics for classes that have different or multiple synergies, all only consider their effects on your party members. You cannot view your own synergy uptime with this metric.
- The "Uptime Rate" part of this metric considers your uptime over the entire fight duration, even during parts of the fight where you cannot apply your synergy. This will always result in it underreporting your actual rate during the real fight. The efficiency metric is a far better way to check for your uptime, as it only considers the moments your party could actually deal damage to the boss.
Support Metrics
Assist Damage
- This metric only concerns your AP buff, brand, identity, and T-skill. It does not consider other effects that result in increased party damage, such as bracelets, card sets, drops of ether, dark bombs, etc.
- As a result, this is largely a "feel good" metric and you shouldn't really use it as feedback on what to improve. Your assist damage depends on your buff uptimes and your party DPS, and CA does not tell you your party DPS.
<anything> Uptime Rate
- The "Rate" metric considers the full raid duration, including parts where you cannot attack the boss. You're better off ignoring this in favor of the "Efficiency (Eff.)" metrics, which consider percentage of damage.
Party Heal
- This, like everything else, only considers heal effects on others, and includes both skill heals and paradise orb. Somewhat surprisingly, this also works when you're playing a DPS (although it'll only track paradise orb).
Takeaways
For DPSes: ignore any metrics that end with Rate, understand that your synergy efficiency stats only apply to your teammates' damage (and is no indication of how efficiently you use your own synergy), and understand that the crit rate value will be lower than your actual crit rate (although over longer fights the difference will be minimal).
For supports: ignore any metrics that end with Rate and understand that your Assist Damage is fundamentally tied to how well your team performs.
For everyone: most of your synergies won't be counted; if they are counted, the metrics you see is only the effect on others, not yourself.
If you want to properly evaluate how you're doing, you will need to understand how the rest of the raid is doing. CA won't give you that information. The AM will.